just say N2O to drugs

Here's a supplementary item to add to yesterday's Mystery Object round, and it's another one you might want to wash your hands after handling, although to be fair that applies to pretty much everything at the moment. I was loading small children into the car to deliver them to school/childcare when I spotted the item below nestling on the edge of our driveway, next to the wall.

Now I'm not as up with current drug fashions as I used to be but I reckoned there was a pretty good chance that this was an item of drug paraphernalia. It's a similar shape to something like an amyl nitrite capsule, but those are usually glass as they're designed to be crushed. A moment of reverse Google image searching revealed that this is a nitrous oxide canister, huffing laughing gas being apparently all the rage at the moment. Not much else to laugh about, to be fair.

The Sun is of course the best place to go for some cold hard facts on this subject, but even viewed through the lens of some right-wing moral panic nitrous oxide seems to be relatively benign, with the obvious caveats which apply to pretty much anything, i.e. don't attempt to operate heavy machinery while under the influence, inserting pressurised gas canisters directly into bodily orifices is probably a bad idea, and there is an upper limit to the amount it's safe to take and going beyond that may have unpleasant and permanent consequences. All of which advice (apart from the sticking gas canisters in your arsehole bit) applies equally well to more socially acceptable stuff like, say, gin.

There is also an amusing typo in the first Sun article which, if it were true, would make the drug considerably less appealing to its users: